To live or to die

The blade's tip emerged from the front of Satoru Gojo's right chest, slick with dark red blood.

Satoru Gojo lowered his head and looked at his chest.

A neat slit had been torn through his black uniform. The blade sat between his ribs, precisely severing a branch of the aortic arch. The angle, the depth, the offset that avoided his spine-everything had been meticulously calculated.

Not to kill him, but to stop his heart from pumping blood within three seconds.

"!"

Satoru Gojo's lips moved, but no sound came out. His sunglasses slipped off his nose, and the brilliant blue in his Six Eyes rapidly dimmed.

Behind him.

Toji Fushiguro held the hilt in one hand. His other hand had already drawn a second short weapon from his waist, swiftly delivering another strike.

"The moment you dropped Limitless, your heartbeat changed." Toji's voice was flat, as though he were describing the weather. "I waited three days for you."

He pulled the blade free.

The instant the blade withdrew, the second strike swept across. Its segmented edge, linked like a snake's vertebrae, trailed afterimages as it slashed diagonally from the left shoulder to the right waist.

Gravity dragged Satoru Gojo down. He toppled sideways onto the stone steps. Blood gushed from both wounds, spreading rapidly along the patterns in the moss.

"Satoru-!!"

Suguru Geto's voice shattered the mountain's stillness.

Riko Amanai's mind went completely blank.

Her mouth hung open as she watched the white-haired boy who had stood at the forefront protecting her for three days fall soundlessly, like a tree with its roots cut away.

Kuroi lunged forward to shield Riko, blocking the girl's view with her own body.

Suguru Geto was already moving.

He turned both palms over, and the cursed energy inside him surged.

Two cursed spirits-Rainbow Dragon and Slit-Mouthed Woman-were released simultaneously. Their massive spiritual bodies shredded the surrounding foliage as they bore down on the figure above the stone steps.

Toji did not look at what Suguru Geto had released.

His eyes were fixed on the figure leaning against a tree farther away.

Yang Jian.

But his body had already responded instinctively. He turned sideways to evade Rainbow Dragon's charge, pushed off the edge of a stone step, and shifted three meters sideways. A backhand upward slash of his short blade split Rainbow Dragon's lower jaw.

A blade without cursed energy could do little damage to a cursed spirit, but the Inverted Spear of Heaven's special property dismantled every cursed technique effect at the point of contact.

The cursed technique Slit-Mouthed Woman unleashed collapsed outright.

Toji did not linger in the fight. His target had always been the star plasma vessel.

"Suguru Geto." Toji vanished beneath the cover of the canopy, his voice coming from three directions at once. "You're easier to deal with than Satoru Gojo."

Yang Jian moved.

Rather than charging at Toji, he walked over to stand in front of Kuroi and Riko.

The shadow beneath his feet began to change.

Sunlight pierced the gaps in the western canopy, casting mottled patches of light and shadow across the stone slabs.

But the shadow directly beneath Yang Jian defied the laws of optics entirely-it slowly swelled like a living thing, spreading steadily in every direction from his feet.

Pitch-black, thick, an absolute darkness without depth or boundary.

"Stay inside the shadow."

Yang Jian's voice held no inflection. He did not even turn to look at Kuroi and Riko, keeping his gaze on the depths of the dense forest beneath its towering ancient trees.

Riko's teeth chattered, but Kuroi gripped her shoulders and dragged them both toward the center of the black shadow.

In the forest.

Suguru Geto's condition was rapidly deteriorating.

The way Toji fought inherently countered jujutsu sorcerers. Zero cursed energy made him completely invisible to sensory cursed techniques, while the Inverted Spear of Heaven rendered every defensive cursed technique useless.

And that body, honed to its absolute limit, possessed speed and reflexes beyond human bounds.

One after another, the cursed spirits Suguru Geto released were cut down, dismantled, and dispersed.

Seven cuts of varying lengths marked his robes. The deepest had sliced through the deltoid of his left arm.

He could not locate Toji.

Only wind and birdsong flowed between the tree trunks, occasionally punctuated by a faint footstep. By the time he caught that footstep, the blade was already before him.

A large blade thrust at him head-on.

Suguru Geto forcibly twisted his waist aside. The tip scraped past his ribs, tearing open a broad stretch of flesh.

A kick immediately struck the back of his knee.

Suguru Geto dropped to one knee.

Toji loomed over him, his short blade pressed against his neck.

"A word of advice," Toji said. "Stop releasing cursed spirits. You're wasting my time."

Suguru Geto's vision began to blur. Blood loss and exhaustion overwhelmed him at once, leaving his mind feeling stuffed with cotton.

He saw the ground beneath Toji's feet.

Something was spreading.

A pitch-black shadow crawled silently up from below the stone steps, spreading in a way that belonged to no natural light source.

Toji noticed it too. The instant he looked down-

Suguru Geto's body sank soundlessly into the shadow.

Like a stone dropping into water, the black surface rippled slightly, then went still again.

He was gone.

Toji took two steps back.

Above the stone steps.

Yang Jian stepped forward.

With every step, the shadow beneath him lengthened. It crossed the stone slabs, climbed the steps, and swallowed the moss, staining the sunlit mountain path pure black inch by inch.

The branches of the ancient trees creaked faintly within the shadow, as though something invisible were gnawing at their roots.

Toji stood at a bend in the steps fifteen meters away, holding the Inverted Spear of Heaven across his body as he narrowed his eyes at the approaching man.

"Toji Fushiguro." Yang Jian stopped. "I've heard a great deal about you."

Toji offered no pleasantries in return.

His gaze swept quickly over the expanding shadow beneath Yang Jian's feet, and the corner of his mouth twitched.

"Are you in it for the money too? How much did Jujutsu High pay to hire you?" Toji tucked the Inverted Spear of Heaven back at his waist, his tone relaxing a little. "Why not hand over the girl? We can negotiate the price."

Yang Jian did not answer the first two questions.

"Then I'll have to disappoint you." Yang Jian shook his head. "I'm protecting this girl, no matter what."

Toji's gaze passed over Yang Jian's shoulder-

There was no one behind him.

Riko, Kuroi, Satoru Gojo lying on the ground, and Suguru Geto, who had just sunk into the shadow-all of them had vanished.

Not even blood remained on the stone steps, as though no one had ever fallen there.

Toji's pupils contracted slightly. Teleportation alone could not do this.

He stopped testing him.

He burst into motion.

His legs crushed the moss on the stone steps as he became a blur and plunged into the dense forest.

Yang Jian did not move at all.

Three seconds later.

Toji flashed out from behind a tree to Yang Jian's rear left, driving the Inverted Spear of Heaven through Yang Jian's back with all his strength.

The tip emerged from his chest.

Toji's fingers felt something real-the resistance of the blade entering flesh, the vibrations of ribs breaking. Even the warmth of the blood spraying onto the back of his hand was exactly right.

Then the surface of that "body" began to crack.

Skin became bark, and flesh became wood fibers.

What Toji had impaled was not a person, but a cedar tree thirty centimeters in diameter.

The Inverted Spear of Heaven was embedded deep in its trunk.

Toji yanked the blade free and retreated.

"What the hell?!"

A sound from Yang Jian came from six meters to his right. He stood beside an old pine, hands in his pockets, his posture casual.

Toji did not hesitate. The Inverted Spear of Heaven thrust out again, its segmented, snake-like edge tearing through the air and precisely piercing the spot over Yang Jian's heart.

It felt exactly the same.

Blood sprayed, the chest caved in-then it turned into a split tree trunk again.

Toji withdrew his blade and retreated behind a thick zelkova tree. His breathing remained steady, but he adjusted the angle of his grip.

Yang Jian appeared a third time.

This time, Toji did not attack.

He stood where he was, studying the largely expressionless face across from him.

"Is this your domain technique?"

"Nothing that crude." Yang Jian smiled faintly. "Inside this area of mine, your intuition, sight, touch, hearing, smell-all five senses are unreliable."

Toji clicked his tongue.

"Now that's a real pain."

As he spoke, his gaze swept over his surroundings-the trees, stone steps, light and shadow, the direction of the wind. Everything was exactly as it had been five seconds earlier, but he knew none of it was real.

"Interested in making a deal?" Yang Jian asked.

Toji raised an eyebrow. "Let's hear it."

"The Time Vessel Association." Yang Jian named it. "Go wipe it out. We split the money inside fifty-fifty, and you can pin the blame on me."

"And my payment?"

"Your payment is-" Yang Jian tilted his head. "Your life, and the lives of your family."

Toji's smile disappeared.

The mountain wind swept through the forest, stirring the loose hair over his forehead. His gray-green eyes locked onto Yang Jian.

"Are you threatening me?"

"Yes." Yang Jian admitted it openly. "You can't even leave this forest right now. I'm offering you a way to live, with no restrictions on your freedom afterward. A good deal, isn't it?"

The silence lasted four seconds.

Toji put away the Inverted Spear of Heaven.

The gesture meant he had abandoned his fighting stance for the moment.

"You sly little bastard."

He spat out the words and nodded.

The next instant, Toji's vision went black.

When he opened his eyes again, Toji was standing on a gravel path.

Before him stood a closed iron gate, with a weathered wooden sign hanging overhead-

[Time Vessel Association · Main Hall]

The three-thirty afternoon sunlight struck the iron gate, reflecting a dazzling white.

Toji looked back.

Behind him was an ordinary road stretching into the distance, with trucks and cars passing as usual.

No black shadow, no forest, no young man who smiled as he threatened people.

He stood at the main entrance of a religious facility somewhere in Tokyo.

"...Is this his ability too?"

Toji rubbed the back of his neck and looked down at his completely unharmed body.

After a moment, he turned toward the iron gate and drew his large blade.

"Fifty-fifty... reasonably sincere, I guess."

Toji raised his foot and kicked open the Time Vessel Association's gate.